We all hate google and youtube, but overall as a community we’re all simultaneously lukewarm and non-committal about pushing towards using an alternative. I admittedly cling to invidious frontends for dear life.

It seems like whenever somebody asks for an alternative to youtube, they’re offered Odysee and Peertube, but inevitably many others chime in about the shortcomings of both of those platforms.

Can we as a community come to a consensus as to which of these platforms should be pushed forward?

I don’t even think it needs to be a binary choice. Obviously youtube cannot be immediately replaced for it’s archival of educational and tutorial videos, but we can at least push newcomers towards using invidious frontends for those instances.

Maybe Odysee is better for some type of content over Peertube. Let’s discuss which platform works best for what and try to be more active about sharing and promoting them not just to viewers but potential creators as well.

If you go to share a youtube link, try to see if that video exists on an alternate platform first and share that link instead. I think that’s a good first step towards getting away from youtube in the privacy community.

But youtube alternatives are still very much on the fringe and I’m hoping this post will at least inspire some discussion about changing that.

  • Broken@lemmy.ml
    5·
    23 hours ago

    I think one of the biggest challenges is alternate choices for creators. If everybody posted their content to YT plus another platform, things would naturally start shifting.

    If a channel I follow posts to Odysee then I watch it there. I follow multiple channels that also post to Nebula, so I try to watch it there.

    But there’s no clear standard for what platforms are good for what. There’s also a paywall issue with some (like aforementioned Nebula) that not everybody will be able to pay. I’ve also tried Curiosity Stream, and never watched it because there was no content I found worth it.

    Then there’s the technical issues. I can’t believe that I am paying for Nubula when their app sucks so badly. (I will probably cancel but haven’t yet). Odysee is so much better than when it launched but it’s still a pile of dung. PeerTube I never felt worked well at all, so much so that maybe I’m missing something. But while I might not be the sharpest tool in the shed if I can’t figure it out then its a bad platform.

    So in all reality, there isn’t a replacement for YT. I wish there was, but there isn’t. There should be, but there isn’t. Yes, we should try to post alternate links and such, but that’s not going to make much of a difference in the end.

    And sorry, this all came out significantly negative sounding. I don’t mean to be crapping on the post or the idea. I just mean to point out that the issue is much deeper than user interactions. There’s an infrastructure problem first (we need a viable working alternative), then a content problem second (we need to convince creators to move there), and only last is there a user interaction issue (which this post is discussing).